This blog collects my postings and publications on IQ, personality and Genius. The Genius Famine, a book written from this blog, is available free at: http://geniusfamine.blogspot.co.uk or can be purchased at Amazon

Selected and edited from The Hour of Decision by Oswald Spengler 1933. Bold emphasis added.

*

The decay of the white family, the inevitable outcome of
megalopolitan existence, is spreading, and it is devouring the “race” of
nations. The meaning of man and wife, the will to perpetuity,
is being lost. People live for themselves alone, not for future
generations.

The nation as society, once the organic web of families, threatens to dissolve, from the city outwards, into a sum of private atoms, of which each is intent on extracting from his own and other lives the maximum of amusement — panem et circenses.

The women’s emancipation of Ibsen’s time wanted, not freedom from the husband, but freedom from the child, from the burden of children, just as men’s emancipation in the same period signified freedom from the duties
towards family, nation, and State. The whole of Liberal-Socialistic
problem-literature revolves about this suicide of the white race. It
has been the same in all other Civilizations.

The apparent increase of the white population all over the
world, little as it is in comparison with the volume of the colored
increase, rests upon a temporary illusion: the number of children
grows ever smaller, and only the number of adults increases, not
because there are more of them, but because they live longer.

But a strong race requires not only an inexhaustible birth-rate, but
also a severe selection process, which is provided by the resistances
to living represented by misfortune, sickness, and war.

Nineteenth-century medicine, a true product of Rationalism, is from
this point of view also a phenomenon of age. It prolongs each life
whether this is desirable or no. It prolongs even death. It replaces
the number of children by the number of greybeards.

It promotes the
world outlook of panem et circenses by estimating the value of
life by the number of its days, not by their usefulness.

It prevents
the natural process of selection and thereby accentuates the decay of
the race.

Also there are the terrible numbers of abnormal
people of every description, mental, spiritual, and physical, the
hysterical, moral, and nerve cases who can neither beget nor bear
healthy children. Their number is unobtainable, but we can gauge it by
the number of doctors who live by them and the mass of books that are
written about them.

From this degenerate crop comes the revolutionary
proletariat, with its hatred born of grievances, and the drawing-room
Bolshevism of the aesthetes and literary folk, who enjoy and advertise
the attractiveness of such states of mind.